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‘Setting Aside All The Legal And Ethical Issues Involved’: A Deep Space Nine Retrospective

Star Trek Deep Space Nine has long been a blindspot for me. I’ve previously stated that Trek of the nineties became increasingly domesticated until Voyager and Enterprise consciously adopted premises that would restore the opera to space. Sitting at the conclusion of this trend would be Deep Space Nine, a show in which the Enterprise was traded in for a space pretzel and boldly going was forsaken in favour of intrigue and war. However, to find out if that was the case I would have to actually watch the show, so I did.

Unlike my previous retrospectives, I didn’t have the time to watch the entirety of Deep Space Nine. I followed the geek.com rewatch guide until the beginning of season six, then watched every episode of seasons six and seven. I later went back to watch Life Support, Heart of Stone, Doctor Bashir, I Presume, For the Cause, and For the Uniform as those were episodes missed by the rewatch guide that looked important. If you can recommend any episodes I haven’t seen, let me know.

Before I get in to things I must clarify. If you’ve been following this blog you would know that I’ve previously written about Babylon 5, the J. Michael Strazcinski helmed space opera to which Deep Space NIne is so often compared. I prefer Babylon 5 to Deep Space Nine, but I don’t think it’s productive to discuss why one show is better than the other. If you like deep Space Nine more than Babylon 5, I’m glad it makes you happy.

Deep Space Nine does not so much extend Star Trek as take place within Star Trek. While ships go off exploring the delta quadrant, Deep Space Nine stays at the door and manages the traffic. There are murders and ambassadors and planets, but the show is more concerned with the intricacies of galactic politics than going boldly.

In fairness there is a war on. The Dominion War is the kind of event that Star Trek would normally use as back story; the kind of barbarism that the humanity of the 24th century has moved beyond. Here we are thrust into the mess of it, and the greater part of Deep Space Nine is concerned with the detail of waging an interstellar war. Ends justify means, and casualties are suffered. Moreover, the Federations cupboard is opened and the skeletons played with; Section 31 comes to light as the federations muscle, and the implications of those sterile treaties between ambassadors is given a human face in the Marquis. Admirals attempt to co-opt fear for fun and profit and children are sent to war. It’s all very grim.

But if there is any failing in Deep Space Nine it is the lack of reconciliation between the machinations of the Federation here and it’s ideals elsewhere. Benjamin Sisko and Julian Bashir and Worf carry on in the face of great assault on their principles, but emerge with little to show for it all. The show was Star Trek’s first foray into the story arc, that great tool of the golden age of television, but it fails to reach any interesting conclusion. Stuff happens that takes more than an hour to resolve, but there is little overall narrative beyond the development of individual characters, the plot of the war, and whatever the Prophets have in store for Sisko. Julian Bashir may be filled with disgust at the actions of section 31 but he doesn’t do anything to end it’s tenure. Sisko may have lost all self-respect in bringing Romulus into the war through subterfuge and murder, but there is no great fallout from this. Eddigton’s rage at the Federation on behalf of the Marquis comes to naught as the movement is subsumed by the greater conflict. When Sisko and Ross refuse to drink a toast to the defeat of Cardassia with Martok, it rings with the hypocrisy of men who wish to be above the kind of barbarity they have committed to get here.

If Deep Space Nine has added anything great to the canon of Trek it is not political complexity or long-form storytelling. It is this:

Look at these loveable dorks, who have achieved such greatness. There are no daring captains or genius engineers or automatons aiming for humanity here. Nog becomes the first Ferengi to join the Federation, after seeing the futility of his father’s drive for profit. That same father reveals himself to strive beyond the conventions of his society, eventually reaching a position to overturn it. In a show that is brutally hetero-normative, Leeta is simply an uncompromisingly sexual woman who is never judged for wanting the ostensibly gross Rom. It is here that Deep Space Nine does what Star Trek must, showing us people struggling to be better, and it does it with a family carved from a mishmash of cultures, and not a bridge full of paragons.

Star Trek has long given us a crew with a penchant for the classy things of the twentieth century. Sisko loves baseball, and Miles and Julian live out a thousand boys’ own adventures in the holosuite, Michael Eddington paints himself as Jean Valjean. Nowhere is this more evident than in the creation of Vic Fontaine, a living hologram of a nightclub singer in 60s Vegas. For all it’s escapism, none of this is that much fun; we’re watching people relive a fantasy of the past in a meeting place of innumerable cultures, and it limits the show.

Deep Space Nine is also enmeshed with the history of Star Trek; we visit the Mirror Universe and relive The Trouble with Tribbles. While TNG made references to and featured guest appearance from the cast of TOS, it never really treated it with the same level of adulation. This is Trek beginning to show interest in itself divorced from it’s context; there is no going boldly, but instead nostalgia. It’s to be expected that Star Trek would eventually get around to celebrating itself for the sake of it but it gets a little tiresome.

One final note. Deep Space Nine also gave us the USS Defiant:

The Defiant is a federation ship built for war, where the various Enterprises were not. So when some nerd starts waxing tedious about how the Enterprise design is ‘flawed’ based on some understanding of how it did in that one fight with the Borg or the Klingons or somesuch, you can point to this and say ‘that’s not what it’s for! If it were supposed to be a fighting ship it would look like this! NEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDD!’. The Defiant, more than the station itself, is the strongest visual indicator of Deep Space Nine’s place in Staar Trek. This is the war story, and it looks different to everything else because of it.

Deep Space Nine came at the very dawn of arc-based television, and while it is hardly the best example of the form it surely made the path to those shows that would use it well easier; Ron Moore worked on this thing after all. Where it fails it shows us what Star Trek needs to do, push outwards, question everything, be better. Where it succeeds, it shows us how those ideals apply to the imperfect and less capable. Is it actually what I thought it was? The ultimate domestication of Star Trek that subsequent series would seek to avoid? In essence, yes it is, but it is still Star Trek.

Tim